Mobile network operators (also known as wireless service providers, wireless carriers or mobile network carriers) are a provider of wireless communication services to an end user. In order to obtain revenue from providing wireless communication services, the mobile network operator may charge the end user a fee, such as based on the amount of data consumed or bandwidth used (e.g., $40 for 1 gigabyte of data/month). Oftentimes, the mobile network operator will provide a plan whereby the data can be shared among family members (e.g., spouse, children). For example, the mobile network operator may allow 10 gigabytes of data to be shared among four mobile computing devices (e.g., smartphones) for $100/month. In such a plan, when the allotted 10 gigabytes of data has been used by the mobile computing devices in the shared plan, the mobile network operator charges additional fees. Such fees are undesirable for the end user and should be avoided if possible.
Currently, each user of a mobile computing device may have knowledge of the amount of data that his/her device consumed and be able to “throttle” or reduce the utilization of data by an application(s) running on the user's device thereby attempting to not use more data than allotted.
However, in the shared data plan context, the user may have no knowledge of the amount of data consumed by the other devices in the shared data plan. Hence, another device in the shared data plan could consume an amount of data that would cause the total data allocated across the devices in the shared data plan to exceed the total allotted data, or even consume the entire allocation of the shared data by itself, outside the sphere of knowledge of the other users in the shared data plan.
Some mobile network operators provide the ability for the user to obtain a report regarding the shared data usage. However, such a report does not provide the real-time amount of data used by the devices in the shared data plan. For example, the report may indicate the data usage as of the last business day. Furthermore, in order to access such a report, the user has to log-in to the mobile network operator's website which is time consuming.
Hence, there is not currently a means for the user to have access to real-time data usage among the mobile computing devices that share a data plan in an effortless manner thereby providing an opportunity to avoid unnecessary fees by taking actions to prevent the total allotted data to be used among the mobile computing devices that share a data plan from being exceeded.